Pollen from One's Past

Pollen from One's Past

Cleo gazed at her enormous garden, summoning an unsweet acidity of all the times she had spent in this palatial house. She could not help but see a lustreless frieze when staring at the greenery inhabiting her pristine garden. Was it the vodka, disguising as sinless water, of which Cleo imbibed, that dampened her perspective? Or, perhaps, it was her having to vacate this house for her husband’s want of an imperial mansion. O’ how troublesome living is for the rich! 

In Cleo’s backdrop, resounding throughout the cavernous walls, was the hubbub of the removal crew. They tore through their possessions with little care, clattering and jostling their priceless commodities. So incautious were they, that an outsider may have mistaken them for burglarious amateurs. 

Cleo desisted from forbearing the removal crew’s inattention, when she heard a heap of glasses shatter upon the sandstone floor. Embodying herself again, she stormed up to the culprits, and chastened them with a supercilious whisk of her hand. Startled at how this frail woman could inflame all of a sudden, they apologised for their errors. They pretended to have incurred Cleo’s words of advice, when, in reality, once Cleo emplaced her vigilance elsewhere, the culprits resumed being incompetent. 

On a whim, Cleo and her deceptive vodka began to wander throughout the house. She idled from chamber to chamber, inspecting the effigies which her husband had let her accumulate over the years. From having been enwombed in a diaphanous gossamer for protection, her effigies appeared ever so grotesque. The eyes on her bronze model of Nemesis had such glaring envy. Where Oziyus had once invigorated Cleo, she was now uglified to a patinated threnody. 

In the elongated corridor, which led to the chiselled front door, Cleo manoeuvred past more of the removal crew, crippling their spines with an enamelled piano; at intervals, its weight would hamper the crew, and a dissonant chord would chime. Cleo climbed the maze of stairs, omitting every other step out of a passion to thrill her ennui. At the peak, where afforded a marvellous view of a reproduction of the stained glass found at the Pink Mosque, Cleo sighed. She sipped thrice, and continued her meandering. O’ how that tedious fervour persisted in blearing all which ought to have been lovely. For instance: the silken sheets on the Super King bed, draped with scarlet ruffles hanging over its edges; the genuine paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Klimt, and Morisot. Even the invaluable painting from Pablo Picasso’s Blue Era was ineffectual. Nothing could arouse Cleo from how numb and dumb she felt.

Onwards she marched, as a soldier perdu at war, and into her daughter’s chamber. The improvidence was odious to Cleo, for it had been adorned with whatsoever her daughter had desired. The furniture was of tasteless antiquity - bought for but the sake of being old. It was coloured with a blinding decadence, and decorating at haphazard were first editions her daughter had doubtless neither read, nor touched. There was a sewing machine, unused, in the farthest recess, upon a mahogany Captain’s Desk. Cleo chuckled to herself as she recalled how her daughter had pleaded for this sewing machine - as with innumerous other “hobbies” - and soon deserted it. 

What had her daughter succeeded at? retrospected Cleo. “Being twenty-six without a profession, a degree,” Cleo murmured, “or any scholastic triumph should be humiliating.” 

Repulsed by anger, and a contrition of having blundered at some point whilst mothering her daughter, Cleo lurched back into the upper corridors of the house. She renewed dissecting each visible atom, till she had done so everywhere…save one chamber: the basement. There was a compunctious dread from what Cleo knew lurked in that subterrene. She wrestled with what fear infixed, but failed to overmaster her wistful curiosity. So long had it been since last Cleo visited those unwelcome depths. What harm could it do to me? - was how this curious ache justified itself to Cleo. 

Back amongst the removal crew, who were as reckless as ever, Cleo was unheeding toward what damage they inflicted upon their commodities. Tranced was the way she descended the crepitant stairs, and Cleo was undaunted by the dark engulfing her. After fumbling for the sole source of light in the basement, she at last thumbed a switch to illuminate her surroundings. A lambent sulphur emanated from the stony ceiling, shafting beams which glistered through the dust that hovered amidst the air. A smoggy odour, willowing from the basement’s incinerator, was offensive to Cleo. From having inhaled a large quantity of fine sediment, Cleo choked on the drought that had contaminated her lungs. Her glass of vodka had been greyed all over with scum. 

Once remembering the exact location of where she had buried what she sought, Cleo waded through an arid fog. With reticence she clenched a leathery memoir, bound in forsaken filth, and sat atop a cardboard box. Resting her vodka aside, Cleo was immobilised by the premonitions swamping her. In spite of being disconcerted, Cleo braved her fears and slithered the book ajar, peeking at it with one eye shut. The first page had been so weathered that the initials were now illegible. Flicking through, Cleo maintained a grimace as if being subjected to monstrous smut. This was how she masqueraded her true emotions. Beneath, with each new page she turned, Cleo was being entombed in days when life wondrous gladded her. The deeper she paced through, the less she was able to feign implacability. Her eyes widened, and tears cooled down her cheeks, although she wiped them before they could sodden the memoir. 

Cleo stopped at a particular page, where both a poem and photograph was muralled. They had been spun in a web from an arachnid antiquarian, prompting Cleo to gust formidable gales so as to clean them into being appreciable. When studying the photograph, nostalgia lapsed Cleo into a bygone time: it was of a meadow where she and her former partner had often promenaded, as well as picnicked. The Arcadian trees towered heavenward, the flowers burgeoned their blithe pollen, and the sun had infused them with delirious love. O’ how she had, and still adored that winsome smile of his. 

Before diverting to the poem, Cleo dried her rheumy eyes. Her former partner had always romanticised these poetical gifts by writing with elegant curvature. An “S”, for example, would snake upward and downward as its flexuous body writhed upon the page. 

Cleo began to read aloud in a muffled tone: 

Recall how we wended hither and yon,

And, under the emblazing sun, 

Those diamantine eyes shone. 

Your dun hair coiling in vines

—An earthly splendour befit.

The noonday rays may have been aurous,

But your visage, as always, was moonlit.

Stricken by all that is supernatural

I collapsed inward from our blest fun: 

The meadow wherein we wantoned, 

Amongst butterflies bestreaked and empurpled,

With flowers of marbled white, 

Is where enthused that forefeel of a Love uniflorous. 

Wise men warn of fools rushing in, 

And so be it;

For I would rush into an Orphean Inferno,

If it meant you and I could embrace

For even a fitful second. 

Infatuated be where my stance kneels, 

And devout be how my fidelity appeals. 

Yours forevermore. 

Cleo plained at how redolent the verses were to her; conjuring a daemon of guilt to drown her. Not all of her sorrows were directed at a pining for this spectre. When her former partner had described her as having eyes bediamonded, dun hair, and a lunar face, Cleo was disgusted at how different her appearance was now. She had emaciated from discontent, reddened from perpetual shame, her hair grizzled through ages of ruing, and the glint in her irises were as blunt as a rhinestone. When looking at the photograph again, Cleo was nauseated by how it preserved beauty and happiness. It juxtaposed her own inhospitable routine, and was reminiscent of a relic now irreparable in her present. 

She drank the remainder of her sedimentary vodka, and pressed yet farther through what may disinter. Leafing on and on, she stumbled upon a variance in facial expressions: at the start, they were both besotted and rapturous, however, later they deadened and puckered to being hostile. In a matter of twenty pages, Cleo had revived her and her former partner’s fall from endearing grace. 

At length another poem and photograph emerged to snarl from this abyssal memoir. The image, whose film had deteriorated from neglect, was of their first flat together. Sited near Regent’s Canal, she recollected how extraordinary their view had been: Cleo would often throw an exiguous object into the tranquil water of the canal, then, hypnotised, she would watch it ripple and wrinkle. When thinking of how the cost of that flat had so racked them with arrears, Cleo laughed at the irony of how she now abhorred the comfort of wealth. 

“Is there a medium between indigence and affluence?” brooded Cleo. 

Leaving the photograph, Cleo began to read the following poem written by her former partner: 

Why do seasons change? 

Why must the flora 

Of palpitant Love estrange? 

We now share inconstant moments: 

From embosoming together in the eve, 

To us quarrelling over a pittance. 

Where, and when, did our bliss of old eschew? 

Woe betides when that plethora 

Of pious unison unjoints. 

Winter rimes its icy forbiddance,

Till so unrecognisable that we misconstrue

Love and Hatred to grieve. 

I, nonetheless, believe 

That we can retrieve what we once achieved. 

The remedy is but a reconcile inwrought

Thus enfold amidst my arms ajar

To redeem our goodly sheen,

And ward that agone which makes us distraught. 

Let Love bloom and lull the hint

Of our decaying stint.

Let that foretaste of waste be not in haste. 

Think of all we have faced!

Under the cover of our strife lies beauty, 

Thus prevailing is our duty.

Yours forevermore. 

The poem evoked a remembrance of how they both had spiralled in vertigo, and plunged into abject venom. The uncertainty in this work was blatant, and Cleo shivered at having to continue since she could predict what lay ahead. Indeed, she could have forsworn what endeavours she strove toward, but Cleo was too valorous to cower once having committed. She was tired of having malingered like a truant eluding culpability and onus. Cleo wished to purify herself with nothing but her brutal truth, even if that meant atoning through voluntary malaise. 

The successive photographs were too corroded and discoloured for recall, but what poem next arose was liquescent with power: 

Something malign dawns upon this night;

A wicked light rots our Love in plight.

An inkling foreknew of how we may distend,

Alas oft did hope defend

That which overglooms lovesome might.

I put Blame upon myself:

Is it my Penury which has impoverished?

Or my incessant Failures which had us demolished?

Doubt is worst served inshore.

O’ how distressful ‘tis to see one peal,

Like the rind on an orange,

Whereafter we reveal 

The pretence of all which we conceal.

Foresmelling deceit in where we eat,

I pray this fright will be finite.

Hopeful to be yours forevermore 

Cleo may have predicted her deceit being mentioned, though that did not assuage its extremity in the slightest. Quite the contrary, it all the more disturbed Cleo that she knew what was to come. The memoir and her former partner were irrepressible. A string of questions materialised: what had induced her to have wreaked mischief? Was it the hardships they suffered from their penury, which had misguided Cleo into scavenging for prosperity? If so, was her decision, albeit adulterous, not pardonable under the circumstances? Or was it her former partner’s literary failures, which had bewitched Cleo to want to be disembarrassed of him? What did it matter anyhow - she had chosen her path, and wound up being married to resentment. 

Smothering her melancholia and suppressing her need to weep, Cleo persevered with the final pages in the memoir. A while flittered till she happened upon another photograph of intrigue, depicting the eve before they separated. The ink at the top right of it had diluted and faded, whereas on the left a crinkle recoiled from timidity. Cleo gazed at how triste they both seemed, and with rapidity she shunned it aside as though it were corrupted by evil. She once anew divined what the poem affixed to this photograph consisted of, but she read it all the same - some wounds covet additional agony: 

When two Earths collide 

Rapture entwines, 

Knotting like ivied poison. 

When two doves fly afar, 

A louring cloud may develop

As a replacement for what Love 

Had once coruscated like a star. 

How can one confide

In anything when the heart sickens? 

Joy, instead of erecting due shrines, 

Is marred by all that should be smitten. 

O’ Cleo, am I the fool of trust, 

For my word was misgiven

Upon a wing by whom gulled me.

All that remains is for me to watch from a scree,

As your vulturous feathers beat for someone else.

Aghast am I at how you thrust

Me from what was sacred. 

I ought to begrudge 

But I shall be a maturer judge;

The admirable person 

Is the one who can swive in forgetting,

Rather than threaten from their fretting. 

I pray you fare well with Anthony. 

Please know that, despite all having been fordone,

 You have been forgiven.

Adieu, Cleo. 

Sombre waves undulated awash Cleo with regret and penitence, ebbing aback and imprinting her with briny scars. Her fortitude waned, her heart quaked, her fingers trembled, and her melancholia waxed. Cleo was chafed by a wrath of having trespassed upon the sanctity of their bond, all in the pursuit of lucre, wealth, and a fallacious security in life. 

Can one measure their happiness by how enriched they are? mused Cleo. 

A noise from the crepitant stairs burst through Cleo’s pensive state: her daughter had returned from wherever she had been vegetating. 

Cleo glimpsed at the perplexion on her daughter’s face - she was almost menacing at her from what dusty squalor she believed her mother to be rolling in. To be sure, Cleo was wallowing, however, she was not rolling as a swine does in feculence. 

Agog, her daughter averted her attention to the leathery memoir abreast Cleo. “What are you holding?” she asked with her habitual gall, as she advanced closer to Cleo. 

Anxious from an ulterior cause, Cleo shut the memoir so as to encumber her daughter from seeing whom she was mourning. When her daughter discerned how secretive she was being, she attempted to dispossess Cleo of it. They scrimmaged awhile, as chevaliers jousting over a maiden, till a random photograph drifted groundward. Her daughter seized it, blew its encasement off, analysed whom she saw, and upon them being unrecognised, she urged Cleo to explain. 

An unaccountable whim invested Cleo to juggle the truth over her daughter’s head, and so she did with taciturnity. “Nobody…At least, no one that concerns you.” 

Wincing, and handing the memoir back to Cleo, her daughter grunted an overweening smirk to exemplify her affront at being excluded. “Father is home,” antagonised her daughter, before escalating back up the stairs whence she came. 

Once in solitude, Cleo soughed, contemplated the memoir, and toppled upon the floor. When eliminating her daughter from knowing about whom she had seen, Cleo had deceived yet another person, like a serial perjurer in court. Cleo’s former partner was, in fact, far from a nobody in relation to her daughter. On the contrary, to her daughter this former partner was, in actuality, her veracious father. Anthony, the man whom her daughter entrusted as being her real father, was but an imposter. It was the man whom she had observed seconds ago, that was indeed her fatherly phantom. And he would forever remain that - a phantom - for Cleo could not bring herself to unbosom such treachery to her daughter, nor could she to Anthony, her husband. Neither would ever be enlightened of Cleo’s rending secret. 

Why bestir chaos when things were already forlorn? Some lies are best left white, and some truants prefer when elusion indwells. 

To consecrate her duplicity, as well as establish an irrevocable distance between her and her former partner, Cleo divested the incinerator of its offence by heading toward it. Flooded with tears, she ignited the fallow machine, and before jettisoning the memoir, Cleo whetted it with a remorseful kiss which was soon engorged upon by its lolling flames. The ashen miasma, belching from its gorge, suffocated Cleo, nevertheless she tolerated it as a form of biblical redemption. 

She stared awhile at the incinerator, meditating on how altered her life would be, if she had but opted to stay with this man. In all probability, her daughter would not have been polluted by what entails boundless wealth and spoiled prolificacy. Nor would Cleo be as dejected as she always was, and nor would she lament the choice she had erred in taking. 

“If I had a wand that could enchant me back in time,” keened Cleo, “then I would wave it without hesitating.” - alas, there is no such sortilege on Earth, and thus we must brazen our errors lest we be enveloped by retribution. All tawdries come at a price, and the Hounds of Baskerville shall forever dog one for their deceit. 

Dabbing her tears, Cleo departed from the basement to rejoin her family, whilst burrowing a hole to discard these revelations from being able to resurface hereafter. Cleo was at illusory ease when ascending, for she considered the ordeal to have been slain. However, like how the ashes of the memoir would everlast in the bowels of that incinerator, so would her regret, shame, grief, guilt, and melancholia.

Beasts are indelible, if left unreckoned. One can shift and shirk from house to house, but a fevered mind stands still.